"The extent of my murders," I replied, "would be limited only by the supply of burglars."
It does a fellow a lot of good, when he is just moving into the responsibilities of a real citizen, to perform mental assassinations like that. I piled up my dead and we passed on.
We found, by pushing another button, that the Consolidated Gas and Electric Light Company had provided the chandeliers in both parlor and dining room with as many globes as could be crowded into the set. The man who put them in left them all turned on. We burned fully seven cents' worth of watts before it occurred to us to limit the incandescence by turning off a few globes. Then my wife got a mania for economizing, and it was Uncle Henry on a high chair under every individual set of lights, tickling the little flat black key things into a subdued quiescence. We left one watt incubator in each set, with the understanding that if company came we'd turn on the whole business and average it up on the month by sitting as late as possible on the front porch.
But there was one button that got me. It was in the front bedroom with the double-mirror doors on the big closet. We pushed it and didn't hear a thing. Logically, it ought to do something. I pushed again and listened for the tinkle. My wife went upstairs and downstairs, while I pushed, and every now and then I'd yell at her.
"Anything happening?"
"No," she would reply. "Push it real quickly and see if you can't take it by surprise!"
I tried every method I could think of to make that push button earn its existence. Every day since I've tried it, determined to learn what it ought to do or die in the attempt. But to this day that push button is a mystery.
The Adventure of the Reluctant Cow:
Billy Pentz wants to know if we will keep a bee at our house. We will not. And another thing, I don't know why bees are kept in an apiary. I cannot see the line of identification between bees and apes. Apes should be kept in an apiary; bees should be kept in a beeswax.